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Month: September 2016

If you are looking for a secure cloud storage service that is hosted in Germany, encrypts your data before it is uploaded into the cloud and has a client that runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android, then Hornetdrive is a possible choice. The business account allows for collaboration in a team without charging you for each user, which I find to be the one feature that truly sets it apart from most other offers. In summary, I looked around at the time and found them to be the best choice in terms of features provided and price. I have no affiliation with the company.

Now, the client software is supplied by the company for Windows, Mac and Linux. The linux version comes in two flavours, a .run-file for “RHEL 6 (or derivatives e.g. CentOS 6, Oracle Linux 6) and above, latest versions of Fedora & SUSE Linux” and a .deb-file for “Debian Linux, Ubuntu Linux (latest versions and current Ubuntu LTS release)“.

This post briefly describes how to get a package for arch linux that can then be installed like any other package using the pacman packet manager. The route taken is to use the debtap script/programme to automatically convert the .deb package into an arch package without having to do any work. Well, almost none. I have chosen this path because I have no knowledge of package maintenance myself, and while interested in general, I simply can’t find the time to learn more about it at the moment. So, thank you to the people who created the amazingly useful debtap package.

After you have installed the debtap programme, change into the folder that contains the Hornetdrive.deb package and call on it using debtap as follows (no super-user rights required):debtap ./Hornetdrive.deb

The programme will ask you for a name for the package. I put “hornetdrive”.

Next it will ask you for the license for the package. At this stage I am unsure what to refer to. The .deb package includes information on “section” and calls it “non-free/net”, so that is what I entered.

The final step asks whether you would like to edit the created .PKGINFO file. Here you have to say yes i.e. choose an editor. This is necessary because arch linux recently unsplit the libdbus package into the core/dbus package, and so we have to make a small change to the dependencies of the automatically generated .PKGINFO file.